THE AMERICAN-INSTITUTES-FOR-RESEARCH REVIEW OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE STAR GATE PROGRAM - A COMMENTARY

As a result of a Congressionally Directed Activity, the Central Intell igence Agency (CIA) conducted an evaluation of a 24-year, government-s ponsored program to investigate ESP and its potential use within the i ntelligence community. The American Institutes for Research (AIR) was contracted to conduct the review of both research and operations. Thei r September 29, 1995 final report was released to the public November 28, 1995. As a result of AIR's assessment, the CIA concluded that a st atistically significant effect had been demonstrated in the laboratory but that there was no case in which ESP had provided data that had ev er been used to guide intelligence operations. This paper is a critica l review of AIR's methodology and conclusions. It will be shown that t here is compelling evidence that the CIA set the outcome with regard t o intelligence usage before the evaluation had begun. This was accompl ished by limiting the research and operations data sets to exclude pos itive findings, by purposefully not interviewing historically signific ant participants, by ignoring previous extensive Department of Defense program reviews, and by using the questionable National Research Coun cil's investigation of parapsychology as the starting point for their review. Although there may have been political and administrative just ification for the CIA not to accept the government's in-house program for the operational use of anomalous cognition, these external conside rations appeared to drive the outcome of the evaluation. As a result, they have come to the wrong conclusion with regard to the use of anoma lous cognition in intelligence operations and have significantly under estimated the robustness of the basic phenomenon.